SOURCE: Jensen, Eric Frederick. “Schumann and Literature.” In Schumann, pp. 39-57. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

In the following excerpt, Jensen explains how Schumann's literary erudition informed his critical style.

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading, while we are young.

—Hazlitt, “Whether Genius is Conscious of Its Powers”

For much of the nineteenth century, the interest of composers not just in music but in all the arts was truly extraordinary. An interrelationship among the arts was commonly recognized. “The well-educated musician,” wrote Schumann, “can study a Madonna by Raphael, the painter a symphony by Mozart, with equal benefit. Yet more: in sculpture the actor becomes a silent statue while he brings the sculptor's work to life—the painter transforms a poem into an image, the musician sets a painting to music.”¹ Coupled with a broad interest in the arts was a preoccupation with the “extramusical...